Awards
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year
Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007
Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2007
Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year
Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007
Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007
A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007
In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for significant contributions to the field of contemporary music. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardA Pulitzer Prize FinalistOne of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the YearA Washington Post Best Book of the YearA Time Magazine Best Book of the YearAn Economist Book of the Year
A Fortune Magazine Top Book of the YearA Newsweek Favorite Book of the YearA New York Magazine Top 10 Book of the YearA Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year
A Slate Best Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Deems Taylor Award
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Winner of The Guardian First Book Prize The Rest Is Noise shows the origin and enduring influence of modern sound on twentieth century life. It tells of maverick personalities who have resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with the purest beauty or battered them with the purest noise, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art. Ross takes us from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties, from Hitlers Germany and Stalins Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies. He follows the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. In the tradition of Simon Schamas The Embarrassment of Riches and Louis Menands The Metaphysical Club, the end result is a history of the twentieth century through its music. “The Rest Is Noise is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music . . . With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, The Rest Is Noise is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement . . . a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand ‘more seeingly in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.”Geoff Dyer, The New York Times “The Rest Is Noise is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music . . . With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, The Rest Is Noise is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement . . . a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand ‘more seeingly in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.”Geoff Dyer, The New York Times
“In Rosss book, by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music, history winds through the pages like those highway signs and mountains. We linger over some; others whiz by. For a dozen years or so Ross has been the catholic-minded critic for The New Yorker, writing about new music without a chip on his shoulder or a tone of condescension and not as a defensive apologist for a supposedly embattled culturebut instead fluently, as if taking for granted that new music were on its own terms every bit as relevant and vital as contemporary art or literature. His prose is notable in a discipline that frets too much about its obsolescence . . . When he writes his way, Ross leads you to imagine you really are, to borrow his subtitle, listening to the twentieth century.”Michael Kimmelman, The New York Review of Books
"What powers this amazingly ambitious book and endows it with authority are the author's expansive curiosity and refined openness of mind."Jamie James, Los Angeles Times
“An impressive, invigorating achievement . . . This is the best general study of a complex history too often claimed by academic specialists on the one hand and candid populists on the other. Ross plows his own broad furrow, beholden to neither side, drawing on both.”Stephen Walsh, The Washington Post
"Readers love The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by New Yorker critic Alex Ross. It was that most rare literary beastboth a lively read and an authoritative overview of a complex topic. In its sweep Ross' book offered a bird's-eye view of a massive arc of time and space that ranged from Imperial Vienna and Mahler's monumental symphonies to Silicon Valley and John Adams' 'Nixon in China.'"Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times
"It would be hard to imagine a better guide to the maelstrom of recent music than Mr. Ross, who worked on this book for a decade. He has an almost uncanny gift for putting music into words. No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording."The Economist
"Ross is a supremely gifted writer who brings together the political and technological richness of the world inside the magic circle of the concert hall, so that each illuminates the other."Lev Grossman, Time
"[Ross] states that his subtitle is meant literally: 'this is the twentieth century heard through its music.' He informs the reader that the book is the result of fifteen years of work as a music critic. He also occasionally reiterates the purpose of the book as the text unfolds, as, for example, then he writes that the book illuminates 'the
Review
"[A] long and thrilling ride....Alex Ross writes about music in vivid language humming with intelligence." Salon.com
Review
"Ross is a surpremely gifted writer who brings together the political and technological richness of the world inside the magic circle of the concert hall, so that each illuminates the other." Lev Grossman, Time
Review
"[A] great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand 'more seeingly' in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly." Geoff Dyer, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"The best book on what music is about — really about — that you or I will ever own." LA Weekly
Review
"With every page you turn, the story departs further from the old fairy tale of giants bestriding the earth and looks more like the twentieth century we remember, with fallible human beings reacting to, reflecting, and affecting with symbolic sounds a flux of conditions and events created by other fallible human beings. And turn the pages you do. A remarkable achievement." Richard Taruskin, author of the Oxford History of Western Music
Review
"A rare and successful weaving together of musical and cultural history, at once sweeping and accessible, written felicitously by a seasoned music critic at home in the history of the last century. An enticing and bold invitation to learn something of the great themes of the past century." Fritz Stern, author of Five Germanys I Have Known
Review
"There seems always to have been a 'crisis of modern music,' but by some insane miracle one person finds the way out. The impossibility of it gives me hope. Fast-forwarding through so many music-makers' creative highs and lows in the company of Alex Ross's incredibly nourishing book will rekindle anyone's fire for music." Bjork
Review
"The problems with this history begin with the title page -- with the self-assured title itself, which seems more promotional than informative, and with the subtitle Listening to the Twentieth Century, which grows more shifty the more you think about it. It might mean listening to the characteristic sounds of the twentieth century the roar of the jet, the song of the cell phone, the ear- and brain-splitting din of carpet bombing rather than listening to music. Twentieth century music, as Ross has stressed with much vigor, even spleen, is mostly popular, and increasingly international. But a writer whose ambition was 'to talk about classical music as if it were popular music and popular music as if it were classical' talks mostly about Western classical music as if it were classical." Joseph Kerman, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopsis
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year
Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007
Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007
A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007
In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Synopsis
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year
Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007
Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007
A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007
In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Synopsis
In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties, from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Synopsis
Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, journeys from Vienna before the First World War to New York in the 1970s and 80s. The result is not so much a history of 20th century music as it is a history of the 20th century through its music.
Synopsis
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year
Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007
Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007
A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007
In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Synopsis
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year
Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007
Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007
A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007
In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for significant contributions to the field of contemporary music. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardA Pulitzer Prize FinalistOne of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the YearA Washington Post Best Book of the YearA Time Magazine Best Book of the YearAn Economist Book of the Year
A Fortune Magazine Top Book of the YearA Newsweek Favorite Book of the YearA New York Magazine Top 10 Book of the YearA Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year
A Slate Best Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Deems Taylor Award
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Winner of The Guardian First Book Prize The Rest Is Noise shows the origin and enduring influence of modern sound on twentieth century life. It tells of maverick personalities who have resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with the purest beauty or battered them with the purest noise, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art. Ross takes us from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties, from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies. He follows the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. In the tradition of Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches and Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, the end result is a history of the twentieth century through its music. The Rest Is Noise is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music . . . With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, The Rest Is Noise is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement . . . a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand 'more seeingly' in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.--Geoff Dyer, The New York Times The Rest Is Noise is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music . . . With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, The Rest Is Noise is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement . . . a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand 'more seeingly' in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.--Geoff Dyer, The New York Times
In Ross's book, by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music, history winds through the pages like those highway signs and mountains. We linger over some; others whiz by. For a dozen years or so Ross has been the catholic-minded critic for The New Yorker, writing about new music without a chip on his shoulder or a tone of condescension and not as a defensive apologist for a supposedly embattled culture--but instead fluently, as if taking for granted that new music were on its own terms every bit as relevant and vital as contemporary art or literature. His prose is notable in a discipline that frets too much about its obsolescence . . . When he writes his way, Ross leads you to imagine you really are, to borrow his subtitle, listening to the twentieth century.--Michael Kimmelman, The New York Review of Books
What powers this amazingly ambitious book and endows it with authority are the author's expansive curiosity and refined openness of mind.--Jamie James, Los Angeles Times
An impressive, invigorating achievement . . . This is the best general study of a complex history too often claimed by academic specialists on the one hand and candid populists on the other. Ross plows his own broad furrow, beholden to neither side, drawing on both.--Stephen Walsh, The Washington Post
Readers love The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by New Yorker critic Alex Ross. It was that most rare literary beast--both a lively read and an authoritative overview of a complex topic. In its sweep Ross' book offered a bird's-eye view of a massive arc of time and space that ranged from Imperial Vienna and Mahler's monumental symphonies to Silicon Valley and John Adams' 'Nixon in China.'--Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times
It would be hard to imagine a
About the Author
Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for significant contributions to the field of contemporary music. The Rest is Noise is his first book.